Protestant friends of mine used to always hit me over the head with the hypocritical immorality of Catholic hierarchy, especially their church sanctioned parties. You see the Basilica of St Mary in Minneapolis every year has a "Basilica Block Party" with bands, beer, and I bet brats. The irony(to say the least) is these same friends also attended and enjoyed the Block Party(perhaps they thought everyone "enjoyed" it in excess as much as they did).....The Basilica Block Party began in 1995 as a fundraiser to pay for the $9.5 million structural restoration of The Basilica of Saint Mary, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Proceeds from the event will fund the continued renovation of The Basilica. Five percent of proceeds have been designated for the St. Vincent de Paul outreach program to serve those in need. The program provides food and shelter to nearly 3,500 people a month, as well as shoes and transportation assistance to 250 people every week.
The goal of the Basilica Block Party is to promote the spirit of volunteerism and community. More than 25,000 people gather annually in the presence of the historic Basilica of Saint Mary and surrounding blocks to celebrate good food, great music and summer fun.
This year's party was last weekend, with headliners like Weezer and Barenaked Ladies (those are really big names Dad29). What are everyone's thoughts on this? I tend to think this is a good thing if done the right way... but then there are some oddities like their Musical Sins page on their site that make me think that this particular block party may be done in poor taste. But then again, I like the idea of a secular celebration being physically and financially centered around a local church. Interesting that they chose completely secular bands, versus your Christian Toby Mac or Relient Ks of the world(but not "worship" music like the MercyMe types - they'd puke on stage if they knew you were drinking). Or even a more cultural choice like Gaelic Storm or Scythian. They did have some local bands, which would have been my next argument also.
Chime in, I haven't yet come to a conclusion. Word on the street is St Mary's is where alot of liberals seem to congregate. I've never been there though.
4 comments:
And this is different from a parish-festival how?
Take a look at the Musical Sins page linked above. It's sort of funny, but considering most people don't believe in sin at all it might be a bit self defeating(poking fun at the Old Way of thinking). Or am I being a prude? There are very few parishes anywhere around my area that have music at parish festivals, which seems to me to be a shame. But if somebody brought out a stereo and started playing Weezer's "Hash Pipe" song there, we'd probably have excommunications in play.
How is this different from Bingo? I don't like popular music but I've volunteered a couple times, once as security, another time as a driver for one of the groups. I've never seen anything untoward, and the music ends at 10:00 on Friday and Saturday nights.
I've been told that Cities 97 who selects the groups has developed some kind of code so that the possibility of offensive language, etc. would be minimized.
They do give guided tours of the inside of the church to those interested during the day and a goodly number of people do take advantage of it. They also have evangelization people at the ready with information to hand out to those Catholics who might be interested in joining the parish.
Thanks Ray, I was hoping you would comment on this one. I'm glad to hear there is some kind of code in place. It was my natural conclusion that this is fine, but of course when I have some Fundie's wagging their finger at me I suppose it made me thing more about it. They assumed the reputation was that everybody there was trashed... maybe they were just looking in the mirror.
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